Nick Page

I’m currently researching various designs for a new Bible timeline to go in the Soul Survivor One Year Bible. Anyway, I’ve stumbled across some wonderful examples of timeline design.

Take a look, for example at this gloriously convoluted history of American Political parties from the 1890s:

Zoomable pic here

The Minard map of Napoleon’s campaign in russia has been acclaimed as one of the best infographics ever:

And you can find more here at Strange Maps, which is a treasure trove of unusual and thought-provoking cartography.

While the Edward Tufte website contains a wealth of examples. Along with promotion for Tufte’s books, of course.

I’m currently re-reading Ray Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451. It tells the story of Guy Montag – a ‘Fireman’ whose job is to burn books, in a world where all books are forbidden.

The story began as a novella, written in 1951. It was then developed into a book in 1954. Bradbury describes a future where reading no longer happens, where people sit in their ‘parlour’  surrounded by interactive TV programmes which replace real relationships. Billboards are 200 feet long so that speeding drivers can make sense of them. In a prescient description of the iPod society, he describes people oblivious of their surroundings, drugged by the music and propaganda delivered to miniature speakers plugged into their ears.

Bradbury wrote it primarily as a blast against the TV, but it’s clear that he was also dwelling on images of the Nazis burning books. Having said that, the book is not strictly about censorship – or, at least, it’s about self-censorship. The villains in Fahrenheit 451 are the people who let it happen, who stopped reading because it was too inconvenient or difficult or uncomfortable.

And, it’s not just the iPod. Bradbury’s world is coming true in other ways, as in this article from today’s Guardian which wonders where the time for reading has gone.

I would post more, but I’m off to finish my book.

‘Is Amazon building a superkindle?’ The New York Times reckons Amazon has bought up a small touch-screen company and will build a ‘Superkindle’ – a rival version of the iPad, with built in applications.

Well, they’re bound to launch a colour reader. But as to adding applications, I doubt Amazon could rival the iPad for that. Amazon is very good at selling books, but rivalling Apple at software and hardware looks like a step way beyond them.

And the real issue around eBooks remains the format. Apples choice of the ePub format is canny, since it’s not a proprietary format, unlike Amazon’s AZW format on the Kindle. (We’re back into Betamax versus VHS.) There is a hint of monoply about Amazon, with the AZW format books only available at their website. The iPod is the dominant mp3 player – but you can add mp3s from anywhere. It’s easy to buy them from Apple, but it’s not obligatory. That alone would make me think twice about buying a kindle.

I saw this picture of the pope the other day. I should have been thinking about his comments on equality and his forthcoming visit, but I really though ‘Blimey. That’s an enormous hat.’
Look at it.

Now compare it with the Archbishop’s Hat:

I wondered if the size of the hat was linked to the number of followers. There are, after all, many more Catholics than Anglicans. But then you’d expect it to be reflected by the Orthodox churches. Here are the Patriarchs of Constantinople and Russia (somewhere around 300 million combined).

Nice hats, but clearly not high enough for the number of followers they have. But what if the size of the hat really reflected the number of Christians in those communions? The result would look like this:

Which is why the Archbishop should really wear a beret.

(There are also some 800 million protestants in the world, but they are so splintered and fragmented they’d all want a flat cap each.)

Perhaps I should do a book: Stupid graphics to explain the church.

This is how Google News are classifying today’s story about Terry Pratchett:

I’d hardly call assisted suicide ‘entertainment’. They’ll be bringing back gladiator fighting next.

My admiration for Sir Terry knows no bounds – well not many bounds, anyway. But the thought of ‘assisted suicide tribunals’ sounds rather chilling.

The Apple iPad and its iDad

Well, it’s here and the world seems strangely the same…

My first thought was ‘Oooh. That’s lovely.’ But then I think that about any Apple hardware.

My second thought was ‘It’s a big iPhone.’

Because it didn’t seem that revolutionary to me. It couldn’t possibly live up to the ridiculous hype (a hype, incidentally, not whipped up by Apple, who merely sent out an invite. The hype was from the media, particularly the print media, who are desperately looking for the Saviour of the Newspaper to arise.)

It’s not a revolutionary new eReader – although I can see magazines and newsprint and certain books looking very good on this thing. What it is is half a laptop. That’s why is find it actually quite appealing. Because with the iPad I don’t have to carry my laptop around with me. I do a lot of speaking engagements and use KeyNote all the time. With the iPad I can do presentations from it, write on it, surf the internet on it. (Although how Jobs describes it as ‘the best web surfing experience ever’ when it doesn’t have Flash is a bit mystifying. Wave goodbye to YouTube.) Everything, in this case, though, depends on the keyboard.

And then there’s the books. The interface looks incredibly like the brilliant Delicious Library application, which Mac users can use to catalogue their books. But is this really anything special as an eReader? Why have the publishing companies rushed to sign up?

One reason: Amazon.

Publishers are nervous of Amazon. They don’t want Amazon to dominate the market – especially not the eBook market. What they want is for there to be competition.

Publishers have told me that Amazon sells eBooks at a loss. A book sold by the publisher to Amazon, for example, at £5 will be sold in its Kindle version at £3. Why? Because they want to dominate the market. They want to win this battle. This is the real significance of the iPad and, particularly, of the choice of ePub as the format. It’s a Kindle killer. Or rather, a Kindle wounder. Publishers don’t want to see the Kindle dead, but they don’t want it to dominate the market. Otherwise, what is to stop Amazon becoming an eBook publisher? MacMillan is already engaged in a price war with Amazon.

Publishers would surely be happier with Apple dominating than Amazon. Apple, for all the domination of iTunes, hasn’t launched a record label. But Amazon has already signed up Ian McEwen who has exclusively released his back catalogue as eBooks through them.

Anyway, the iPad. Time will tell about iths device, because in the end, it’s not the device that people buy, but what it can do for them – what Guy Kawasaki called ‘the Killer App.’ I can’t help thinking that the real importance of this device will be in education. I can see a situation, in a few years time, when cheaper versions of the iPad will be all a student needs to take to school with them. Imagine carrying all your textbooks, all yourhomework, your timetable – almost all the information you need for the day in one device?

Shame it can’t wash your P.E. kit. Although, even if it could do that, the media would still have been disappointed.

OK, so what can eBooks give you that real, physical books can’t?

Choice. Theoretically, you’ll be able to access millions of books instantly. You’ll be able to carry thousands of books round with you. Why you should want to carry thousands of books round with you isn’t immediately clear; research, perhaps, or education, or travelling. But reading a book isn;t like listening to tunes on an iPod. You don’t switch from one book to another that quickly. I don’t get to the end of a chapter in Moby Dick and think, ‘I want to read a couple of paragraphs of Jane Austen now’. (Actually, I never want to read Jane Austen at any time.) So not thousands, but the ability to take all your holiday reading in one slim volume is quite nice.

Immediacy. You can download it instantly and read it there and then. This could be quite good. But it’s been slightly mitigated by the Amazon next day delivery service. Waiting 24 hours for something isn’t that long. However, if you want to read something you can access it quickly. Those who use googlebooks know already how consulting a book there can save you a lot of time going and digging it out in a library. For research purposes this could be great.

Weight. This is an advantage. If you’re schlepping heavy textbooks around, the ability to carry them in a device weighing ounces is dead good. And if you’re on a long trip, you don’t have to worry about which hefty paperback to take: take them all. An eReader is lighter to hold as well.

Searching. Search facilities are good. Although, as I posted earlier, you don’t get that sense of perspective about the text. (Actually I don’t  think the Sony eReader has a search function, rendering this advantage rather moot.) But you will be able to find a reference quickly.

Cost. Might end up being an advantage, but isn’t much at the moment. A lot of the main costs of books are not in the physical production, but in everything which makes the book – editorial, design, proofing, marketing, etc. So I’ll doubt they’ll be much cheaper. And the readers themselves cost $250–400. The price point is going to be the big thing. If publishers price things too high, then piracy will increase. That was one of the key reasons why, since the days of the C90 Cassette, customers ignored all the ‘Home Taping is Killing Music’ warnings. Customers believed that they were being ripped off, by having to pay £14 for a CD. I don’t think books are in that scenario now – if anything the cost of a book has gone down in real terms over recent years. If publishers want to mitigate the effects of piracy – they’ll never do away with it entirely – their best bet is to keep the price as low as possible. (While giving the authors a better royalty rate, of course!)

I’m not sure what else is a real advantage. Having had a chance to look at the Sony and the Kindle the other day, I was pleasantly surprised by the reading experience. Type on the Kindle was good to read and the device was light and easy to handle. Having said that, the graphics were appalling. I tried looking at the map at the front of a Stephen King book and it was like a fuzzy photocopy. Don’t know what photos look like, but it was like a computer screen circa 1986. A paperback doesn’t run out of batteries (although it doesn’t iluminate itslef in the dark, either).

The publisher I was with summed up the differences between eBooks and physical books as the difference between a SatNav and an Atlas. A SatNav is great when you want to go directly o your destination; when all that matters is getting there. But if you want to see what else is around, if you want to choose a different route, or simply grasp the bigger picture, you need an atlas. In those terms, the eBook is good for straightforward reading: long flights, holidays, novels, perhaps narrative history; where you just want to start at the beginning and finish at the end. But for anything else, you’re still best off with an atlas.

The third reason why I don’t think books are going to go away in a hurry is that they have been around a long time.

This, obviously, is not a cast iron defence. Lots of ancient practices which have survived for many years have been swept away overnight by modern technology. Take the horse and the car. People used the horse for thousands of years before the ‘horseless carriage’ came along. In fact, I’ve seen this used as an analogy for the eBook, notably in a long and interesting essay by John Siracusa. Here’s what he writes:

Take all of your arguments against the inevitability of e-books and substitute the word “horse” for “book” and the word “car” for “e-book.” Here are a few examples to whet your appetite for the (really) inevitable debate in the discussion section at the end of this article.
“Books will never go away.” True! Horses have not gone away either.
“Books have advantages over e-books that will never be overcome.” True! Horses can travel over rough terrain that no car can navigate. Paved roads don’t go everywhere, nor should they.
“Books provide sensory/sentimental/sensual experiences that e-books can’t match.” True! Cars just can’t match the experience of caring for and riding a horse: the smells, the textures, the sensations, the companionship with another living being.
Lather, rinse, repeat. Did you ride a horse to work today? I didn’t. I’m sure plenty of people swore they would never ride in or operate a “horseless carriage”—and they never did! And then they died.

The trouble is the analogy is flawed. Cars replaced horses not because they were a bit better, but because they were a quantum leap forward. The car was much faster, more comfortable, more efficient; it had greater comfort and greater capacity.  eBooks, aren’t actually, that much better. What they offer is mass storage, not a better reading experience. You don’t read books any faster on a Kindle.  If we revert to the horse/car analogy, eBooks are not cars. They are just a cheaper, more portable kind of horse.

If we look at the technologies which have been replaced by their digital equivalents in recent years, they have all been recent technologies. Recorded music has been around for a century or so, the CD for considerably less. DVD, TV much more recent and, anyway, the technology is the same – watching on a screen – so it’s no real change. Significantly, listening to music from an mp3 player or from a vinyl album is still the same experience. It still goes through my amplifier and comes out of the speakers. Similarly, watching DVDs is essentially, the same experience as watching a video.
But reading from a screen is not the same experience as reading from a page. Admittedly, the eBook readers are trying to make it so. That is why they’re so keen on the same terminology, with all the page turning and the e-ink and so on.

It seems to me that, with the technology as it is at the moment, it’s going to be much harder to dislodge five hundred years of the printed book and two thousand years of the book as a format. It’s not impossible, but the book, as an object, is much  more ingrained in our culture than the other media. To have that displaced is going to take a massive leap of technology. Will that leap happen at five o’clock tonight? Doubt it, but you never know.

Interestingly it was Christians who championed the early book form – known as a codex – when people were still using scrolls.  And, appropriately enough, Here’s a bit from one of my books about it.

So, three reasons why the book won’t disappear in a hurry:

1. It’s a much more physical object than other forms of media
2. We respond to and read a book in a different way than we do to online print.
3. It’s got two thousand years of cultural history.

So what do eBook readers offer? I’ll offer my thoughts about that after tonight’s cataclysmically earth-shattering event.

There’s another aspect to the physicality of books. Books have a kind of terrain; they are 3D objects.

You know, roughly, where a passage comes in the book, by its physical position – how far in, whereabouts on the page. Of course, search functions can easily locate a certain passage in an eBook, and you can bookmark away to your heart’s content – but what they don’t give you is the broader context. They don’t show you what is all around in that part of the landscape.

For example, I use Accordance Bible Software. I have 10 Bibles I routinely search, plus Greek New Testaments, Hebrew versions (can’t read it but it makes me look good), and tons of older versions, etc. Fantastic software and invaluable for searching. But often when I’ve found the passage I’m looking for, I’ll look it up in a physical Bible, because I want to see whereabouts it comes in that book – what happens before and after. Of course I can do this in the electronic version. I can scroll up and down. But I find that I respond to the physical context, more easily. I need to see the landscape surrounding that passage. For this reason I don’t find it intuitive to use the many commentaries I have in Accordance, because I need to see  bigger chunks of text. Using a Bible dictionary, like the Anchor Bible Dictionary, however, is much more straightforward, because there you’re only looking at one article, you know that context doesn’t matter so much.

Books allow for peripheral vision, that perspective. This is a bit tricky to explain, but much of my time these days is spent researching. Often you can’t be sure whether a particular line of research will provide an interesting new direction, a minor diversion, or prove a dead end. What you do is learn to scan the book, to spot interesting threads and ideas, to pick out keywords. You learn how to quickly scan across an open spread and get a feeling for whether it’s helpful or not. Can you do that with an eBook? I work with a lot of journal articles on PDF and I find it much harder to make a quick assessment than when I have them on the printed page.

Obviously this doesn’t apply to all books, especially those like novels which you read sequentially. But I find that there is something about having the work there, opened in front of you, which makes it easier to navigate and to assess.

If you thought the Mont Blanc Gandhi Pen was spectacularly ill-judged, then prepare to applaud Leica for their three limited edition cameras to celebrate the 60th Anniversary of People’s Republic of China.

The camera body has ‘Mao Zedong front type’ and a ‘Tiananmen Square pattern.’ (I don’t know what that pattern looks like. Bloodstains, perhaps?)

Nothing says ‘We applaud you, home of brutal media crackdowns’ better than a special edition camera. What better way to commomorate China’s fine, nine year reign as the world’s biggest jailer of journalists? Just grab your trusty Leica and head out onto the streets of Beijing and start snapping away.

(Only not in Tiananmen Square, obviously.)